The frontier and politics

Out of the frontier and the West which it left behind came a goodly share of the country’s problems and not a few of its most bitter conflicts. The steady advance of population produced recurring clashes with the Native American population. Wars and treaties and ultimate removal of the Indians to reservations were the seemingly inevitable outcome of the American determination to possess the whole continent.

The same steady advance kept the land problem alive. From preemption and graduation to the passage of the Homestead Act and the heavy grants to railroads, the settler was frequently in conflict with those who would use the public domain for revenue purposes. Insistent demands from settlers forced every public servant to offer a land policy suitable to the frontier population.

Cheap lands on which to produce an agricultural surplus carried with them the demand for internal improvements to aid the passage of these goods to market. The part which government should play in the building of roads, canals, and railroads and its right to pass protective tariffs, in part to create markets, occupied almost as much time in the U.S. Congress as did the land policies themselves. All were related to the matter of finances. To migrate to the frontier and to establish a farm in the West was not something which every American could afford to do. It has been estimated that in the mid-19th century it took something like $1,500 to clear and stock an 80-acre farm in the new West. Most settlers had to borrow money, and thus a hostility to banks which restricted credit and a general debtor attitude which favoured inflation characterized most frontiers. From Andrew Jackson to William Jennings Bryan such western attitudes played an important part in U.S. politics.

Westward expansion ultimately carried settlers across the border into Texas, and the idea of Manifest Destiny, born out of three centuries of forward movement, led through the Mexican-American War to the acquisition of New Mexico and California. The moves to organize this vast new territory became tangled with the issue of slavery. The debate about slavery historically had been about the institution itself, but it now broadened into a conflict over the expansion of slavery into the territories. The character of western settlement and the kind of institutions which were to be developed had become a part of a multigenerational power struggle between the North and the South, as evidenced by the Missouri Compromise (1820), the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854). The effort to shape the future of a frontier in Kansas brought the cold war between the sections to open bloodshed. The settlers at Massachusetts Bay, in Utah, and elsewhere had attempted to maintain the unique character of their society, but the doctrine of popular sovereignty had brought rival civilizations into opposition on the frontier.

More From Britannica

shooting: The American frontier

In no way did the frontier advance affect American life to a greater degree than in the creation of sections and sectional conflicts. Each forward movement into a new geographic area meant the formation of a new society which might be under the political dominance of some older state or in territories just beginning their careers in national life. In either case, its needs and attitude did not always agree with those of the more mature groups in the state or the country. The result was conflict, and much of American history, local and national, is made up of the struggles and adjustments which resulted. State capitals have been moved, constitutions rewritten, and legislative programs remade to satisfy contending interests, old and new, East and West. One American state has been divided. New western states have been created out of lands once claimed by older parent states. In one case, settlers who had formed the state of Franklin (now eastern Tennessee) had to give way to the demands of North Carolina. One need only recall the part played by the young West in the American Revolution and in the War of 1812 to understand the frontier’s part in early national affairs. The dominant role which it played in the economic struggles and in the slavery controversy in the years from 1815 to 1860 has already been noted. Even more significant as expressions of western as against eastern attitudes were the Granger, Populist, and Nonpartisan drives of the late 19th century. Each revealed a marked democratic quality; each showed bitterness against eastern neglect; each bore a debtor flavour; and each tried to say that America stood for something which they represented and which, they thought, was being lost.